Wordpress 2.5, a half-assed review.

Good:
- The design has been updated and is much less offensive to the eyes.
- The dashboard has better information at first glance.
- Dashboard widgets will probably be pretty cool.
- The new flash uploader is a big improvement.
- The new gallery feature seems pretty cute, although it isn’t the sort of thing I usually go in for.
- Full screen post writing is nice if you have a lot to write.
- Tag management / tag filling is handy.
- The ability to define permalinks on the fly when writing a post is neat.
Bad:
- The admin has a max-width that is very noticeable (annoying) on a widescreen monitor, especially because it is not centered.
- I miss the categories being on the sidebar on the post pages.
- Tags still are not searchable. Why are tags not searchable?
- There is even more Javascript in the admin than before, for an impressive total of 324Kb, ~2 second load.
TBD:
- Whether or not any of the cute little enhancements break the hell out of plugins that I don’t feel like updating.
- Whether or not nightmarish new vulnerabilities have been introduced. With an update this big, it is almost a sure thing.
Watch Matt’s screencast for a quick overview, I have to update the rest of my sites.













March 30th, 2008 at 8:17 am
They have a list of compatible plugins. I only glanced through, but the only one that jumped out at me was Twitter Tools, which loses the ability to post from the sidebar. With twhirl, though, I doubt it matters.
I bet it breaks the hell out of Hello Ninja, though
March 30th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
How about that one-click plugin updating? I thought that was pretty sweet.
March 30th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
@cliff
yeah, it will be cool when all plugins comply to it, and they change it so you don’t have to de/reactivate any plugin that is updated.
June 26th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
I’m with you on the categories point. It was very handy on the sidebar.
I love the media handling now. Major improvement.
Why doesn’t the basic editor have some basic HTML formatting though. A quick dropdown for formatting a line as an h1 or an h2 would be usable for every level of user.